Angry Birds Creator Faces Patent Lawsuit

The creator of
one of the most successful mobile phone games of all time, is facing a lawsuit
from patent licensing company Lodsys.

Lodsys is a
company with long associations with filing patent lawsuits against technology
companies and among many others, Apple are currently joined in courtroom battle
with the patent licensing company.

Lodsys is this
time suing Finnish games developer, Rovio, for infringing a patent with Angry
Birds on both iOS and Android. Four other games companies have also been joined
in the lawsuit: EA (Sims 3), Atari (Greatest Hits), Square Enix (Big Hit Baseball) and Take Two Interactive (NHL 2K11).

The patent in
question concerns in-app payments and Lodsys originally filed the lawsuit
against seven other games developers earlier this year. This prompted Apple to
defend its developers by saying it had licensed the patent and since the
developers were using Apple’s API, then they were covered.

This has
obviously not dissuaded Lodsys in their attempts to recoup patent licensing
fees, however when the BBC contacted Rovio about the matter today, the Finnish
company said it had heard nothing official about the lawsuit, saying: "As
soon as we receive more information we will take appropriate action."